Pieces Of You

The hottest girl in the room isn't necessarily who you think

They tend to go out on the town in pairs, I've noticed: the conventionally pretty one, all dolled up and shining, and her average-looking friend, who's barely had time to do her hair. The pretty one, I have a hunch, is generally the instigator. With the plainer one by her side, she thinks she'll look even more dazzling than usual. And the plainer one goes along with the idea because she wants to bask in her friend's glow—or maybe because she just doesn't get out much. I don't know. I do know, however, that when I spot them and manage to push in beside them at the bar, I often feel sorry for the pretty one.

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Because she's about to learn she's not the pretty one.

"What are you girls drinking?"

The pretty one answers for both of them in most cases. Hers is the dominant personality, and her heels are higher, too. The plainer one (the supposedly plainer one) isn't wearing heels. They hurt her feet, and she's not afraid to say so because she has no image to preserve. This makes her much easier to talk to. It also makes her more interesting to talk to—and, as the night wears on, to look at. By then, see, the bar is full of pretty women, and pretty women tend to look quite similar. They may not look similar before they dress and put on makeup, but afterward they do.

"Where in Ohio?" I ask the plainer one, who doesn't look half so plain now. I like her nose. I like the fact she has one. The pretty one had a nose at one time, but she hired a surgeon to cut most of it off.

"Akron."

"I love that city," I exaggerate. "It's so...I don't know...so..."

"Depressing?"

"Industrial."

That's when the pretty one, who's tired of standing around with nothing to do but check out her look-alikes and estimate her own rank in the evening's pageant, wanders off to use the bathroom. I don't really notice; I like her friend. Her friend has hands that are too big for her wrists, and when she gestures with them to make a point, I'm mesmerized by their power, their vitality. I'd like to hold them, to feel them on my back. I bet they're warm—much warmer than the pretty one's, which are small and slender but look icy.

Could I have your phone number?"

I ask.

The woman who's no longer plain at all says, "Sure."

I nod and hand over a pen. My crush starts writing. Her friend walks up and sees what's happening. She stiffens. She narrows her eyes.

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It isn't pretty.

In the fairy tale, Cinderella goes unnoticed until her appearance is magically transformed to match little girls' ideal of loveliness, which they grow up believing is little boys' ideal of loveliness. This belief is wrong, though. And I should know, because I'm a grown-up boy who longs for Cinderellas who've never touched a pair of glass slippers—who are plenty alluring barefoot. I prefer them to some princesses I've danced with. I prefer them—these unconventional-looking women who too frequently call themselves ugly or imperfect when they ought to call themselves perfecting—because their transformations are still ongoing.

Maura, the first barefoot Cinderella I fell for, was not a fussy eater, and it showed. It showed in her substantial hips. It also showed in her contented face.

Radiant happiness was Maura's best feature, the kind that comes from filling up on pasta and not leaping up afterward to go running. This distinguished her from the other girls I'd dated during my first two years at college. They were slimmer than Maura, their features more symmetrical, but their facial expressions were harder and more anxious, particularly at mealtimes. Salad without dressing will do that to you.

"Can I scrunch in here with my tray?" I asked her in the dining hall one evening. She smiled and scooted over to make room. I'd been watching her. Her skin had the glossiness of a caramel apple. Her figure reminded me of an apple, too, but this was not a flaw because apples reminded me of pie, pie reminded me of ice cream, and pie and ice cream made me hungry for...Maura.

I didn't go hungry that fall semester, fortunately, but my appetite for Maura confused those who thought she wasn't worth pursuing. A girl I'd once dated, the type who counted her croutons, asked me one day if I had "a thing for heavy women." I told her no, I had a thing for women who enjoyed life. My old girlfriend seemed to find this threatening. She realized, I think, that it's easier to keep off the weight than to keep on the happiness.

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The charm of a barefoot Cinderella is that her beauty obeys no formula and therefore can sneak up on a man. When he becomes aware of it, he feels like he's discovered a secret. And secrets are always exciting.

I once worked in an office with a woman whom none of my colleagues seemed to know was there. Nor did I, at first. Her job was distributing memos and other documents, and she drew no attention to herself as she passed silently among the cubicles. A bulletin about changes in the health plan would suddenly show up on my desk, and I'd have no idea who'd brought it. The tooth fairy? The memo elf?

Then one day, when the office was half-deserted due to an outbreak of the stomach flu, she caught my eye while walking toward me down an empty hallway. Straight hair, straight posture, straight in every way. Flat, too. And wearing glasses. Yet she was provocative as hell, like a stripper who was working under deep cover. She had a disciplined, stealthy sensuality that seemed to whisper to me as she slipped by: "What you see isn't half of what you'll get."

I set out to get it, whatever it was, confident I would face little competition. While hanging around the woman's desk one morning, waiting for her to get back from her rounds, I spied another guy my age peeking at me over his computer. I detected jealousy. When the woman returned, I kept an eye on him as I asked her a stupid question about a memo concerning the corporate softball league or something. Then another guy showed up with a story about a malfunctioning copier. The woman excused herself and went off to help him.

"Get in line," said the guy at the computer.

The movie was based on a novel I'd written, Thumbsucker, about my agonizing adolescence. The director invited me to suburban Oregon to spend a few days on the set. There, I met the woman playing my mother: the Oscar-winning British actress Tilda Swinton. She instructed me to call her Tilda and invited me to her trailer for a chat.

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She struck me at first as less than stunning. Her skin was pale, as though sun had never touched it; she was wearing a costume of homely nurse's scrubs; and her short red hair was dyed a mousey brown. We sat across a small table drinking coffee and talking about our love lives (I was going through a divorce), and I couldn't believe how comfortable I was. Tilda was a Hollywood leading lady—the first one I'd ever been alone with. I should have been too awestruck to lift my cup.

But the awe didn't take long to set in. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, Tilda's unorthodox glamour overwhelmed me. Her pallor turned luminous. And because she lacked the curves and cleavage of the stereotypical female star, there was nothing to distract me from her assured, refined intelligence, which was the sexiest thing about her. In even her most ordinary gestures—raising her coffee cup, patting her pockets to find a ringing cell phone—there was a magnetic elegance. She moved the way thought moves, with a quiet fluidity. Her beauty was pure, unobstructed, metaphysical. But it had a physical effect. By the time the director called Tilda onto the set, my head was swarming with inappropriate fantasies whose moral saving grace was that they featured my movie mother, not the woman who'd given birth to me.

She—my actual mother—wouldn't have been surprised by this encounter. She told me back in high school that there was often an inverse relationship between a woman's superficial luster and her power to entrance the deeper self. But I was a teenager, stuck on cheerleaders, so I didn't believe her right away. Then I went out with a few cheerleaders. And then, later on, I went out with a model. She wasn't shallow or ignorant, this model, but she wasn't stimulating, either. So smooth and uniform was her exterior that she seemed to be encased in glass. The first time I saw her naked, I was flummoxed. Where to focus? Where to start? I gazed at her on the hotel mattress and searched for a scar—or a flaw of any sort that might afford my lust a toehold. My attention kept losing its grip and sliding away, though, so I ended up ordering chocolate mousse from room service as a stalling tactic.

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Need decorating ideas for a small space?

When the confection finally arrived, Cinderella was fast asleep, of course. And I'd changed from a prince into a pumpkin.

To me, it comes down to Los Angeles versus Paris. In L.A., where I've spent some time in recent years, a lot of the women have nothing wrong with them—and nothing particularly right about them either. The outer layers of skin they're constantly peeling and dermabrading must strip away some of their inner selves as well. And who cares about eyelids so tight and firm that they make the eyes beneath them look cyclops-wide and triple-espresso awake? Whatever happened to sultry, sleepy sensuality? As for implants, no matter where in the body they're inserted, they lend a woman a faint cyborg aura. The polymers in them must send out vibrations.

In Paris, which I first visited in my twenties, the situation is the opposite.

I sat there dumbfounded at the small café, watching the street and pretending to read Ulysses as the waiter delivered my third croissant. The passing women weren't what I'd expected. An American pal at my grad school back in England had warned me that Parisian femininity would tempt me to relinquish my U.S. citizenship, and I'd assumed that what he'd meant was that I'd find myself surrounded by beauty queens with magazine-cover faces and centerfold figures. The reality was quite different, though. As the strolling women neared my table, what loomed were their protruding noses, their conspicuous ears, their overly broad shoulders. As they passed, I took note of their formidable posteriors, their lack of any posteriors whatsoever, and their oddly squat or boyish physiques. What lingered when they vanished, however, was their heartbreaking seductiveness.

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They came in all shapes and sizes, these French ticklers, but rarely in the standard ones. The cut and drape of their appearances was haute couture, not off-the-rack. Until I saw them, I hadn't realized how many ways there are for women to be themselves—their best and most enchanting selves. Nor had I known how many parts of me could be aroused by such shows of self-acceptance. I'd been living in one dimension—on the surface of the TV screen, the catalog page—but I'd awakened deep inside the Louvre, with galleries stretching away in every direction (including the one that houses the Mona Lisa, who's no knockout herself but always draws a crowd).

Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Tilda Swinton (humbly disguised as a midwestern nurse). Thank you, sleeping model. Thank you, Maura. Together, you and your ilk have granted men a power we've longed for since we were teenagers: the ability to see through clothes, not to mention layers of foundation and coquettish posing, to the sexy center of a woman. You taught us to walk into parties, bars, and offices and look around not for pageant-winning figures, blown-glass complexions, and foreshortened noses, but direct our gaze downward, at women's feet. Crooked toes? No glass slippers? Promising.

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